Joyce’s treatment of baseball in Going the Distance isn’t merely thematic, according to Punday, who believes that baseball (and its emphasis on numerical ordering) here represents the balance of the poetic and computational that defines Joyce’s electronic literature.
Source: Author's abstract
"The Machine in the Text, and the Text in the Machine" is a review essay on Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary (University of Notre Dame, 2008) by N. Katherine Hayles, and Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination (MIT Press, 2008), by Matthew G. Kirschenbaum. Both works make remarkable contributions for the emerging field of literary studies and the theory of digital media. While Hayles analyses the interaction between humans and computing machines as embodied in electronic works, Kirschenbaum conceptualizes digitally at the level of inscription and establishes a social text rationale for electronic objects.
"Linking subjectivity with computational media is a highly contested project in which the struggle for dominance plays a central role: should the body be subject to the machine, or the machine to the body? The stakes are nothing less than whether the embodied human becomes the center for humanistic inquiry within which digital media can be understood, or whether media provide the context and ground for configuring and disciplining the body." Hayles 2008.
This panel explores alternative avenues for education in digital poetics and electronic literary studies. The panel pieces together problems with categorical, single discipline approaches to electronic literature, critical, cultural, and technological studies looking at the pedagogical and curricular issues associated with media-based and network forms of meaning-making, storytelling, and communication. The primary questions here are: What are the conditions under which a practitioner or scholar are considered expert in the as yet undefined field of media-based expression? And: What solutions are traditional academic institutions offering? Thinking beyond, or outside the exclusive field of electronic literature the panel examines and offers potential alternatives to traditional disciplinary scholarship and accreditation. Each panelist will offer viewpoints, curricular and structural suggestions. The panel will be divided into two sections; the first will be a performative example of an alternative avenue for media culture education, and the second will be a rigorous discussion of the issues related to teaching digital culture and electronic creative practice in single discipline, and sometimes tangential programs and departments. The panel members have been selected based on their own experience with these issues as well as their pursuit of alternatives to institutional formulas.
(Source: Author's abstract, 2012 ELO Conference site)